Current Events Articles: June 2009

Workers renovating a house in the town of Jesus' birth accidentally discovered an untouched ancient tomb containing clay pots, plates, beads and the bones of two humans, a Palestinian antiquities official reported.

Dr. Russell Humphreys' continued work on general relativity is a new answer to the light-transit-time problem—to explain how light traveled from the distant cosmos and reached Earth, all during one ordinary-length day on Earth, the fourth day of creation. The model says that early on the fourth day, God’s creation of Sun and planets nearby plunges Earth into a zone of timelessness. In the zone all physical processes, including clocks, come to a complete stop.

The patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia says he will announce to the world Friday, June 26, 2009, the unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant, perhaps the world's most prized archaeological and spiritual artifact, which he says has been hidden away in a church in his country for millennia, according to the Italian news agency Adnkronos.

A partnership between Italy and Iraq has resulted in a website that showcases the recovered antiquities of Baghdad’s National Museum. A virtual tour of the museum’s artifacts, spanning from the prehistoric to the Islamic era of the Mesopotamian region can be viewed on the website in Arabic, English and Italian.

Since the looting of the museum in 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq, stolen antiquities have been steadily recovered and placed back in the museum. Ancient artifacts that can be found online include the famous Warka Mask, a female marble head from Uruk believed to date between 3,400 and 3,100 B.C., as well as limestone statues of lamassu, which are winged, bull-like creatures with human heads that date to the eighth and ninth centuries B.C.

The orchestrated multimedia blitz over this fossil is almost unbelievable. The paleontologists even got Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, to officiate at the public “launch” of Ida (the cute nickname for the fossil), when it was unveiled—like a new sculpture by a famous artist—to the assembled journalists.